a stout thief being formerly as common a designation as a sturdy beggar. This rogue seeing her asleep by the way-side, cut her petticoats all round about up to the knee; whence it appears not only how soundly she must have been sleeping, and how expert he was in this branch of his trade, but also that her pockets were in her petticoats and not a separate article of her dress.
At the marriage of Sir Philip Herbert with the Lady Susan Vere, which was performed at the Court of Whitehall, in the year 1604, with all the honour that could be done to a great favourite, many great Ladies were made shorter by the skirts, like the Little Woman; and Sir Dudley Carleton says “they were well enough served that they could keep cut no better.” If the reader asks what is keeping cut? he asks a question I cannot answer.
I have already observed that the weather was warm, and the proof is twofold, first in the Little Woman's sitting down by the way, which in cold weather she would not have done; and secondly, because when she awoke and discovered the condition in which this cut-purse had left her, she began to quiver and quake, for these words are plainly intended to denote at the same time a sense of chilliness, and an emotion of fear. She quivered perhaps for cold having been deprived of so great a part of her lower garments; but she quaked for fear, considering as well the danger she had been in, as the injury which she had actually sustained. The confusion of mind produced by these mingled emotions was so remarkable that Mr. Coleridge might have thought it not unworthy of his psychological and transcendental investigations; and Mr. Wordsworth might make it the subject of a modern Lay to be classed either among his poems of the Fancy, or of the Imagination as might to him seem fit. For the Lay says that the Little Woman instead of doubting for a while whether she were asleep or awake, that is to say whether she were in a dream because of the strange, and indecorous, and uncomfortable and unaccountable condition in which she found herself, doubted her own identity, and asked herself whether she were herself, or not? So little was she able to answer so subtle a question satisfactorily that she determined upon referring it to the decision of a little dog which she had left at home, and whose fidelity and instinctive sagacity could not, she thought, be deceived. “If it be I,” said she, “as I hope it be, he will wag his little tail for joy at my return; if it be not I, he will bark at me for a stranger.” Homeward therefore the Little Woman went, and confused as she was, she found her way there instinctively like Dr. Southey's Ladurlad, and almost in as forlorn a state. Before she arrived, night had closed, and it became dark. She had reckoned rightly upon her dog's fidelity, but counted too much upon his sagacious instinct. He did not recognise his mistress at that unusual hour, and in a curtailed dress wherein he had never seen her before, and instead of wagging his tail, and fawning, and whining, to bid her welcome as she had hoped, he began to bark angrily, with faithful but unfortunate vigilance, mistaking her for a stranger who could have no good reason for coming about the premises at that time of night. And the Lay concludes with the Little Woman's miserable conclusion that as the dog disowned her she was not the dog's Mistress, not the person who dwelt in that house, and whom she had supposed herself to be, in fact not herself, but somebody else, she did not know who.
INTERCHAPTER XVIII.
APPLICATION OF THE LAY. CALEB D'ANVERS. IRISH LAW. ICON BASILIKE. JUNIUS. THOMAS À KEMPIS. FELIX HEMMERLEN. A NEEDLE LARGER THAN GAMMER GURTON'S AND A MUCH COARSER THREAD. THOMAS WARTON AND BISHOP STILL. THE JOHN WEBSTERS, THE ALEXANDER CUNNINGHAMS, AND THE CURINAS AND THE STEPHENS.
Lo que soy, razona poco
Porque de sombra a mi va nada, o poco.
FUENTE DESEADA.
The sagacious reader will already have applied the Lay of the Little Woman to the case of Dr. Dove's disciple and memorialist, and mentally apostrophizing him may have said,—